Safari gets better with iOS 5

iPad Help, Tips & Tricks

//June 12, 2011

When iOS 5 is released this fall, it will bring an improved Web browsing experience to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users. Safari will include new features like tabbed browsing, Reader, private browsing and more.

Here you can see the new tabs added in Safari. The photo also shows the Safari menu. iPad users can choose “Add Bookmark”, “Add to Reading List”, “Add to Home Screen”, “Mail Link to this Page” and “Print”.

Once an article has been added to your reading list you can access it here and read it later.

One of my favorite new features in Safari is Reader. Once an article loads in Safari, an icon shows up in the URL bar. Selecting the Reader icon then displays the content stripped of extra images, formatting and advertisements. It is presented with black text on a white background, and the font size can easily be increased or decreased.

The appearance of text in Reader is similar to iBooks.

There’s also a new setting in Safari to enable private browsing. Once private browsing is turn on, the Safari tool bar changes to a darker color to signify private browsing is active.

Holding the back or next arrow in Safari shows a list of recent web pages visited. It’s basically a shortcut to view recent history.

When the keyboard opens in Safari there’s a new “Find on Page” search bar. This makes finding a word or phrase easy in a long web page.

Most of these features are already available with several other web browsers at the App Store like the Atomic Web Browser and Perfect Web Browser, but it’s nice to see these features incorporated into Safari.